History: The Selective Use of the Past Tense

1

I was born five years before my first lie.

My intention was self-preservation (isn’t that always the motive?): to fill the eyes with yes. Or, it was then possible to go back to Eden without mending the mistake by mistaking myself with perfection’s shroud.

Yes, to seismic heat waves

Yes, to summer long waits for my turn

Yes, to animal sensations of warm skin and flight

I was five when I became aware that it was possible to lie.

My parents carried pictures of me in their wallets. I was regarded as someone no one would ever be surprised by, and safe.

I was a child of an episodic tension not always separable from her parents.

A child attentive to merit, eager for a flowered dress, the goodness-affirming snap of plastic hair barrettes shaped like animals, the pleasant agreement of tongue-teased licorice.

And yes, to plenty here, and yes, to more, and yes, to over there, and yes, to the more that was waiting, and yes, to a region of unending celebration, within view of the horizon of safe

I was on the threshold of tame. Unready for delayed good fortune to supersede boredom.

Inside, I chased the desire for motion against the background of stillness, the will to be in constant agitation-unraveling-the-flowered-dress motion. Instead of patent leather shoes, I wanted winged feet.

I sailed over the first gate, taking it in one bound, dirndl skirt ballooning and as my feet made a final push against the earth, propelled me over the barrier my legs scissor kicked as if to meet the sky.

2

I jumped at the second chance/to do it again.

Over the low swinging chain separating the cement-bound from the domesticated bush

Over the marked terrains of public housing reservation landscape

Over the homelands designed for the working man/woman.

Over architecture flash-built to house returning WWII veterans and their families to push their perambulators, their baby-boom armadas, the hardscape concrete and hurricane fence.

I jumped the fence without calculating landfall. Crowed triumphant, eyes gazing upward, singing in my joints’ elevation. What I thought I knew then surmounted tension and the censorship of locked gates. The gates seemed incidental, like fallen trees. What did a high bar mean to me?

3

No one was more surprised than me that I could not fly.

That I fell from the fence parallel to the walk and landed awkward on my left arm, fracturing a bone—the ulna. I told my mother and father the truth in the doses I thought we could all bear to hear.

Not a fall from a fence, I tripped. (A small girl can trip but she doesn’t fall far.)

Then, the fall was some place higher; the gate.

Then, I didn’t fall, I was pushed.

No, it was a crack in the sidewalk, no it was a flyball and the sun got in my eyes, no it was break in the chain of reasoning, no, it

The first lie I ever told was about falling without admitting that I was unable to fly.

I told my father, Thomas, that someone had pulled me down to earth, substituting for gravity an imagined adversary. I told him a girl pushed me when I had simply fallen to earth, broken the spell, and my arm.

Death seldom announces itself and appears in disguise to the young. At five, a Black girl is a local decoration, not visible enough to be erased. A Black girl at five is at a distance from the center of gravity, she stays briefly oscillating in the field of innocence. Yet gravity’s glory is its brutal strength: the way a fall becomes a push, and a push leads down a steep slope toward a stealthily patient death.

I don’t remember this until reminded. How Thomas added my story of the girl’s push to the stories of a thousand other indignities and tornadoed out the apartment door, down the stairs, bypassing the elevator, hurricaned into the streets, with...